Military Affairs: Year In Review 2004

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This article was originally published in the Britannica Book of the Year, an annual print publication that
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In 2004 the tactics of the year-old war in Iraq devolved into a classic guerrilla campaign fought with all its attendant misery. Although the forces of the U.S.-led coalition launched successful offensives in many cities, its troops continued to die steadily in small numbers as the result of hit-and-run attacks by Iraqi and foreign insurgents. Progress on the battlefield was marred by a series of widely publicized incidents that undercut support for the U.S.-led war at home and abroad. The first was the publication in April of appalling images of Iraqi prisoners being abused by U.S. troops at Abu Ghraib prison. (See Special Report.) Several U.S. soldiers were jailed for their part in the incidents, and Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the officer in charge of the prison, was suspended. Prisoner abuse scandals also rocked the British, Danish, and Polish contingents in Iraq.

International support for the war shrank, and coalition partners Spain (1,300 troops), Honduras (370), Hungary (300), and the Philippines (51) withdrew their forces. Poland said that it would pull its 2,500 troops out after the January 2005 Iraqi elections. Australia, however, announced that it would add to the 850 troops it had already committed to Iraq. Successive attempts to uncover deposed Iraqi president Saddam Hussein’s alleged stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) yielded no conclusive evidence that any such weapons existed, and this failure also undermined international support for the war.

In April U.S. forces laid siege to the city of Fallujah in search of the perpetrators of the gruesome killings of four American civilian contractors. The operation failed, and U.S. troops eventually handed the city back to resistance forces. The siege of Fallujah and reports that hundreds of civilians had been killed sparked uprisings across the country. U.S. troops returned to Fallujah in November and engaged in some of the most intense urban warfare they had experienced since the Vietnam War. The price for the U.S. was 51 dead and about 400 wounded in more than eight days of fighting. Some 1,200 Iraqi insurgents were killed, but there were no reliable estimates of civilian casualties.

By year’s end the American military presence in Iraq had grown to nearly 150,000, the highest level since the invasion in 2003; the number of U.S. military dead had surpassed 1,300, and the U.K. had suffered 74 military deaths. The British medical journal The Lancet reported that the number of civilian deaths in Iraq could exceed 100,000, a figure far larger than estimates of 14,000–27,000 made by other agencies. (See alsoWorld Affairs:Iraq:Special Report).

WMD, Arms Control, and Disarmament

The foreign ministers of 42 countries issued a statement calling the entry into force of the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty “more urgent today than ever before”; however, by 2004, 12 of the 44 states required for ratification of the treaty—including China, India, Iran, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, and the United States—had not yet done so. Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said that he was certain that North Korea had processed enough spent nuclear fuel to make four to six nuclear bombs. Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin announced that his country was developing a new generation of nuclear-armed missiles. The U.S. Congress eliminated funding that Pres. George W. Bush had requested for research to develop a new generation of small nuclear weapons.

Following renunciation of its WMD programs in 2003, Libya ratified the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty. Libya also submitted initial declarations to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) and the IAEA. OPCW inspectors verified the destruction of Libya’s stockpile of unfilled chemical weapons munitions, and IAEA inspectors were granted broader access to Libyan nuclear facilities. On April 28 the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1540, which called on all states to prevent terrorist groups and other nonstate actors from acquiring WMD and their means of delivery. India and Pakistan agreed in June to notify each other at least 24 hours in advance of missile test launches.

Other Conflicts

Russia

More than 330 people—nearly half of them children—died in September during the siege of a school in the town of Beslan in Russia’s North Ossetian Republic. The siege was widely blamed on separatist Chechen rebels, and there was much public criticism that the death toll was unnecessarily high because Russian special forces troops had bungled the rescue. The attack in Beslan followed the midair destruction of two Russian civilian airliners in August that was blamed on Chechen women suicide-bombers. Akhmad Kadyrov, Chechnya’s pro-Russian president, was killed in a massive bomb blast in Grozny in May.

Europe

The European Union began its largest-ever peacekeeping operation by taking command of forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The first of 7,000 EU Force (EUFOR) troops from more than 30 countries (including non-EU states Canada, Switzerland, and Turkey) began deploying across the country to maintain the nine-year-old peace agreement that had previously been supervised by NATO. Several hundred British, Italian, and U.S. troops were sent to reinforce the 17,500-strong German-led NATO Kosovo Force (KFOR) after rioting broke out between ethnic Albanians and Serbs. With 19 killed and hundreds injured, it was the worst violence Kosovo had seen since 1999.

Latin America and the Caribbean

Following formal peace talks with the Colombian government in November, 450 paramilitary fighters from the right-wing United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) were demobilized. All 15,000 of the AUC’s members were due to be disarmed by 2006, which would allow the government to concentrate on defeating the Marxist-led insurgency. The UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) arrived in February after dozens of people were killed in violent demonstrations and Pres. Jean-Bertrand Aristide was forced to flee. MINUSTAH included troops from 20 countries and was led by 1,200 Brazilians, the largest contingent that country had ever contributed to a UN mission. It replaced a U.S.-led multinational force that had arrived after Aristide fled.

Middle East

Israel credited construction of the first quarter of a 720-km (450-mi) security barrier separating it from much of the occupied West Bank with having dramatically lowered the number of Palestinian suicide bombings in 2004. Israeli forces mounted major operations in Gaza in which dozens of Palestinians were killed and hundreds wounded. Israel said the actions were mounted in response to Palestinian militants who fired mortar shells and rockets at Jewish settlements as well as firing on Israeli army convoys. Government troops in Yemen battled supporters of dissident cleric Hussein al-Houthi in the north of the country; estimates of the dead ranged from 80 to more than 600. Al-Houthi was reportedly killed in September.

South and Central Asia

Three years after the U.S.-led coalition invaded Afghanistan, the search for Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar continued to prove fruitless. With about 18,000 troops (16,500 of them U.S.), the coalition launched offensives around the country to eliminate remnants of the former Taliban regime and al-Qaeda extremists. Foreign-aid workers and local government officials were subject to numerous attacks and kidnappings around the country, however. A Franco-German-led unit called Eurocorps took over command of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan. Fielding about 6,500 troops, ISAF concentrated its efforts on providing security in the capital, Kabul, but also sent provincial reconstruction teams to conduct humanitarian and development work in other parts of the country.

About 25,000 Pakistani troops searched the mountainous border region near Afghanistan for foreign militants and Pakistani supporters of al-Qaeda. (SeeWorld Affairs: Pakistan:map.) The offensive sparked a backlash from local tribesmen and religious groups, however, and dozens of soldiers and hundreds of militants were reported killed.

India began withdrawing 40,000 of the half million troops it had stationed in Jammu and Kashmir, where it had been battling Islamic independence groups since 1989. Despite objections from Pakistan, India completed a 550-km (330-mi) electrified fence along the Line of Control separating Indian-controlled Jammu and Kashmir from Pakistan. Nepalese Maoist rebels staged a weeklong blockade of Kathmandu that stopped supplies from reaching the city. Numerous clashes across the country during the year left many dead on both sides.

Southeast Asia

Indonesia extended martial law in its troubled province of Aceh. The government said that it had killed 2,000 rebels of the separatist Free Aceh Movement since it began offensives in the province in 2003. Because Aceh was closed to journalists the estimates were hard to verify, and human rights groups said that many of the dead were civilians. Violent clashes between security forces and Islamist militants in the south of Thailand left hundreds of people dead and led to the establishment of martial law in the largely Muslim region. U.S. combat troops, ships, and aircraft were central to the tsunami relief efforts in the Indian Ocean area in late December, and their rapid deployment for humanitarian goals helped improve foreign perceptions of U.S. global military might and operational efficiency.

Africa

Simmering tensions in Africa’s Great Lakes region were reignited when Congolese rebels, allegedly backed by Rwanda, seized a town in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Rwandan troops were said to have entered the DRC, attacked villages, and forced thousands of civilians to flee.

Nine French peacekeepers and dozens of civilians were killed in Côte d’Ivoire after an 18-month cease-fire broke down. France had approximately 5,000 troops stationed in the West African country, and they, along with 6,000 UN peacekeepers, monitored a buffer zone between the rebel-held north and the loyalist south. Following the clashes, more than 9,000 Westerners were forced to flee the country.

Sudanese government forces moved to suppress a rebel uprising in the western region of Darfur and displaced at least 100,000 civilians in the process. The UN reported that pro-government Arab militias, called Janjawid, were systematically killing non-Arab villagers. By September, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell had applied the term genocide to the situation amid reports that more than 70,000 people had been killed in Darfur and 1,500,000 others made refugees, with as many as 200,000 seeking safety in neighbouring Chad. Earlier in the year, the Sudanese government had concluded a peace deal with non-Muslim rebels in the south of the country ending a civil war that had begun in 1983 and cost nearly 2,000,000 lives.

Military Technology

Many of the coalition casualties in Iraq resulted from the insurgents’ using remotely detonated improvised explosives, so the U.S. Army rushed into service robotic devices called unmanned ground vehicles. One type, the Omni-Directional Inspection System (ODIS), replaced the traditional method of inspecting the underside of a vehicle with a hand-held mirror. The 18-kg (40-lb), 10-cm (4-in) ODIS allowed troops to conduct vehicle inspections from more than 100 m (330 ft) away. A joint U.S.-Israeli program tested the Mobile Tactical High Energy Laser by successfully shooting down seven mortar rounds in flight, the first time a laser weapon had demonstrated this capability.

The U.S. Navy commissioned the first of a new class of nuclear-powered fast-attack submarines in October. The USS Virginia cost $2.2 billion to build and was billed as the most advanced submarine in the world. The Virginia-class submarine was the first in the U.S. fleet designed to operate in littoral waters and to support special forces operations. It was also equipped with interchangeable multi-mission modules, which allowed it to conduct various types of warfare. China launched the first of a new class of ballistic-missile submarines. The Type 094 would provide China with its first truly intercontinental nuclear-missile-delivery capability. The Swedish navy began testing what it believed to be the stealthiest ship in the world. The Visby corvette, designed and built by shipbuilder Kockums, had a highly camouflaged hull comprising a PVC core with a carbon fibre and vinyl laminate. The material combined high strength and rigidity with low weight and was difficult to detect with radar or magnetic sensors.

The U.S. Air Force declared operational its new Counter Satellite Communications System, which was designed to jam enemy satellite communications. The ground-based system used electromagnetic energy to disrupt transmissions without permanently damaging or destroying enemy satellites. Proponents of the system said that it would help U.S. forces control space without creating debris that could threaten friendly satellites or manned spacecraft. For the first time, an unmanned combat aircraft delivered a precision-guided bomb on target without human assistance. The U.S.’s developmental X-45A successfully dropped an inert Global Positioning System-guided bomb from 10,500 m (35,000 ft), striking within centimetres of the truck it had been preprogrammed to hit. A human operator 125 km (80 mi) away authorized the bombing but did not participate directly in it. The first six Ground-Based Interceptor missiles of the U.S. Ballistic Missile Defense System were installed in their underground silos at Ft. Greely, Alaska. The system was to have been declared operational by the end of 2004 but with a “limited capability” to destroy ballistic missiles targeted at the U.S.; however, following the failure of a test launch in December, the announcement was deferred until 2005.

Military and Society

In the biggest expansion of the alliance since its creation in 1949, NATO welcomed seven former communist countries as members. The addition of Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia raised membership to a total of 26 states. Defense ministers from the EU states agreed to create a rapid-reaction force that could be deployed on short notice to hot spots around the world. The total force would comprise about 18,000 troops, with each country contributing units of up to 2,000. In a change to long-standing policy, the government of the United Kingdom announced that Commonwealth citizens serving in sensitive military posts would have to take British citizenship in order to keep their jobs. The move was intended to reduce the risk of espionage and terrorism.

Germany announced that it would close 105 military bases as part of a major plan to modernize the military and save up to €200 million ($250 million). The armed forces were to be reduced from 285,000 personnel to 250,000, and the civilian staff was to be cut as well. The Czech government abolished conscription and thereby created a fully professional force of 35,000 men and women and brought to an end the 136-year-old tradition of compulsory military service first introduced in 1868 by the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.

India and Russia signed their largest military contract since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The $1.6 billion deal included the refurbishment and transfer of the mothballed aircraft carrier Admiral Gorshkov as well as its outfitting with MiG-29K combat aircraft and helicopters. The carrier was due to be handed over to India in 2008.

Reportedly, in the first nine months of 2004, more than 900 Russian service members died, the majority from causes other than combat. Russia’s defense minister admitted that over 500 personnel had died while off duty, about 25% of them by committing suicide. HIV/AIDS had infected one in four soldiers in the South African National Defence Force, and the country’s ability to contribute troops to UN peacekeeping missions was severely handicapped. A program to provide infected soldiers and their families with free antiretroviral drugs began in February.

On a trial basis the Israel Defense Force revived the venerable Camel Corps, which had been disbanded in the 1970s, to patrol the desert border with Egypt. It was determined that mounted camel patrols were the best means to thwart smugglers taking drugs, prostitutes, and weapons into Israel.

In August the Bush administration announced the biggest change in the basing of U.S. forces overseas since the end of the Cold War. Once fully implemented, the plan would establish new foreign bases but also transfer up to 70,000 troops and 100,000 family members back to the United States.